Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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source of strength and peace in the battle of life. They agreed in teaching
salvation by free grace, and personal assurance of salvation by a living faith
in Christ and his gospel. But the former went back to the ultimate root in a
pre-mundane unchangeable decree of God; the latter looked at the practical
effect of saving grace upon the individual conscience. Both gave undue
prominence to their favorite dogma, in opposition to Romanism, which
weakened the power of divine grace, magnified human merit, and denied
the personal certainty of salvation. They wished to destroy all basis for
human pride and boasting, to pluck up Phariseeism by the root, and to lay a
firm foundation for humility, gratitude, and comfort. This was a great
progress over the mediaeval soteriology.
But there is a higher position, which modern evangelical theology has
reached. The predestinarian scheme of Calvin and the solifidian scheme of
Luther must give way or be subordinated to the Christocentric scheme. We
must go back to Peter’s confession, which has only one article, but it is the
most important article, and the oldest in Christendom. The central place in
the Christian system belongs to the divine-human person and work of
Christ: this is the immovable rock of the Church, against which the gates of
Hades shall never prevail, and on which the creeds of Christendom will
have to unite (Matt. 16:16–18; comp. 1 Cor. 2:2; 3:11; Rom. 4:25; 1 John
4:2, 3). The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed are Christocentric and
Trinitarian.
THE REFORMERS ALL PREDESTINARIANS.
All the Reformers of the sixteenth century, following the lead of Augustin
and of the Apostle Paul,—as they understood him,—adopted, under a
controlling sense of human depravity and saving grace, and in antagonism
to self-righteous legalism, the doctrine of a double predestination which
decides the eternal destiny of all men. f818 Nor does it seem possible,
logically, to evade this conclusion if we admit the two premises of Roman
Catholic and Evangelical orthodoxy—namely, the wholesale condemnation
of all men in Adam, and the limitation of saving grace to the present life.
All orthodox Confessions reject Universalism, and teach that some men are
saved, and some are lost, and that there is no possibility of salvation
beyond the grave. The predestinarians maintain that this double result is the
outcome of a double decree, that history must harmonize with the divine
will and cannot defeat it. They reason from the effect to the cause, from the
end to the beginning.